Category Archives: Writing

I just want to let everyone know that I haven’t fallen off the face of the earth as it looks like, so I thought I’d check in with you, my readers.

I’ve been trying to finish proofing my husband’s book. We have someone we work with that knows how to get books ready for both e-book publishing and regular publishing and won’t charge us anything up front, which helps our pocket-book immensely.

I have only five more chapters to go through. Currently I’m checking out what appeared to be discrepancies during my first reading of the ms. Other areas where I thought there were discrepancies, I found that their weren’t, but I’m making sure everything is covered, since we’re hoping that the next book will be picked up by a regular publisher.

I’ve been busy as usual running our cleaning business and working with our employees along with working in the grocery story I’ve be at for fifteen years. We’ve been short-handed there and I’ve had to pull several weeks of almost forty hours. The pay is nice, but it’s hard on the body.

I’ve decided to move the blogging challenge posts to my freelancing blog which is probably where I should have put it in the first place. Then I’m going to move a bunch of articles from a different website where they have been residing since around 2010 to this blog.

They are shutting down their website. When I joined someone contacted me by email and asked if I wanted to write five articles for a sum of thirty dollars. They gave me a list of what they had in mind. I didn’t like all the ideas they gave me, I think some of them were card games like black jack, which I know nothing about. I wanted to write about gardening.

Working with each other we came to an agreement and I thought I had a month or so to write them and then found out that they invert the month and date as it is a company from England, and I really only had a couple of weeks to get the articles in. That meant that I not only had to write the articles, but I had to set up a profile and learn how to get around their site.

I did get the articles done in time and they sent me a check for not only thirty dollars, but I got paid forty dollars for my time and effort. I had hoped that the articles and others I wrote over the course of a few years would continue to make money, but no more money ever came my way.

Recently, I considered pulling all the articles, but they had sent me a letter telling me that they were revamping the site and that they hoped I would like what they came up with, so I’ve been waiting to hear when it would be done.

I just remembered that when I read their letter again they talked about a different site they put together at a different address. I guess I may just as well take a peek at it first before putting them all on here as my goal is to be paid for my writing, and if that is a possibility there, I’m willing to give them a try.

A few years ago I worked with a different company entirely that is still online and doing a great business. I was able to make over one hundred dollars with them. The payment was based on views and how many ads were clicked on your pages. That company was ehow.com.

They revamped the site and decided to stick with those that had degrees in writing and journalism unless the writers had a certain percentage of articles on the site already, which I did not.

Again, at the last minute, I decided to take part in a challenge put on by the writing group I’m always talking about. The challenge is blogging for thirty days. You probably know that there are thirty-one days in December, but the person in charge of the challenge has nicely given everyone New Years Eve off, isn’t that nice of her?

I will be using this blog for the challenge and utilizing prompts for the posts each day. I may post extra if I want to write about things other than the challenge, but I may decide to post that on the Freelancing site instead.

If any of you are interested in checking out my portfolio on the writing site, it can be found at: http://www.Writing.Com/main/portfolio/view/sha4852?rfrid=sha4852. If anyone decides to join the site, it is free to join although everything isn’t available to free members. Even those members that ‘pay’ for their membership rarely have to pay in actual cash. But that can be explained if you join the site.

I’m writing this post to to use the word count toward my nano project for the month of November. I thought I’d talk a bit about yogurt, the difference between Greek and regular yogurt and why people prefer one over the other. Another thing to think about is why one type seems to be preferred over the other and is one more beneficial than the other?

I would never have thought about picking this topic for a discussion for one of my blogs on my own. Today, I visited with my mother a bit and my sister is visiting from Detroit as she came up for the Holiday. I happened to mention to her that I made tomato soup today and added Greek yogurt to the soup as Dr. Oz had a guest speaker that suggested doing so.

The guest speaker said that there were certain types of food items that when eaten with other foods provided a fuller feeling in the stomach allowing for some weight loss to take place.

I didn’t see the whole show as I was doing other things, but I did happen to see a portion of the section where they were discussing putting Greek yogurt into tomato soup to thicken it.

I decided to give it a try today as something to eat so I could take some pain medicines hoping not to feel ill (from the pain medicines) afterward. I like tomato soup and I enjoy eating Greek yogurt, so I had no problem mixing the two together, plus on the show it made the tomato soup look nice and creamy, with a nice texture.

When I cook, I don’t like to hang out at the stove, I prefer to be at my computer trying to get some writing done, or anything other than standing at the stove top, plus, (if you’ve read my other blog-the nano one- at all in the last few days) you would know that it’s especially difficult for me to stand in one place right now. Even cooking is difficult to do.

So, I was telling my sister about mixing Greek yogurt with the tomato soup, and she mentioned her thoughts about Greek yogurt and regular yogurt.

I’ve heard it said that the main difference between Greek yogurt and regular is that the water is squeezed out of the Greek. Greek yogurt also has more protein. I have two yogurts in front of me for this discussion, if I do more with this later, I may purchase several brands to make this more complete, but for what I am writing today, this is fine as is.

The Greek yogurt I have is a store brand one, the store I work with specifically, but not one that the majority of you would be familiar with as it is only located (the store, not the yogurt) in the mid-west, mainly.

The regular brand I am using today is Dannon.

Dannon Store Brand-Greek

6 oz serving size-1 container 6 oz

150 calories 100

1.5 gr total fat 0gr

5mg cholesterol 10mg

80mg sodium 100

290mg potassium 230mg

28g carbohydrate 8g

<1g dietary fiber <1g

26g sugars 8g

6g protein 18g

I did not get a flavored Greek yogurt, whereas the regular yogurt I have is with peaches. I was going to state all the types of sugar that comprises the 28g of carbs in the regular yogurt, but that would only be a good comparison if I were to have flavored Greek yogurt also.

My sister questioned the use of Greek yogurt just because the water was squeezed out of it. So what if it’s smoother and creamier. What if someone doesn’t drink enough water, but likes yogurt, this may be one way for them to get more water.

Personally, I enjoy eating several of the common brands of Greek yogurt, but I don’t like the prices. I’ve said to many people that if I ever win the lottery, then maybe I would buy them on a regular basis, otherwise, it’s not a need in my life.

Another option might be to purchase a canister of protein that many mix with milk and some brands can even be mixed with water. These products provide a reasonable amount of protein to supplement anyone’s diet.

My husband drank protein shakes when his leg was healing several years ago. I have a canister in my home now that I purchased for my use. It has 14g of protein which can be mixed with 8fl oz of either milk or water.

My original intention was to mix the unflavored Greek yogurt with the tomato soup I was heating up on the stove today. Since I didn’t stay at the stove and mix the yogurt in when it was just starting to heat up, the yogurt didn’t mix in as nicely as it could have had I been taking care of it properly.

I did have one bowl of it anyway, and it tasted fine and was smooth and creamy. For my last bowl, I reheated it in the microwave and had the bright idea to add a small amount of extra protein from my canister. It wasn’t until I had sprinkled it on my soup before re-heating it that I realized the canister probably wasn’t plain.

I endeavored to eat it anyway, but it wasn’t palatable at all. The slight vanilla taste it was flavored with was just enough to mess with my head making it quite difficult to manage. I didn’t eat much before I had to quit.

It’s hard to believe it would make that much of a difference, that one bowl would make me feel fuller for the rest of the day. I love sweet potatoes and salads, so later in the evening I cooked up a sweet potato, yet was only able to eat about half of what I planned, then a bit later I thought I’d try to eat a salad. I never have a problem eating salads, one of my favorite foods. The same thing happened, I was only able to eat about half. Odd. It would be nice if that was all I was missing, a bit more protein, to be able to eat less and lose the weight I’ve been working on for most of my adult life.

I was going to post the link for the Dr. Oz show from YouTube, but it seems that since the show was only broadcast this past week it’s too early for it to be online. I will try to come back and check for it again in a week or so.

This post is 1131 words while another section I wrote earlier on my writing website is 1448, totaling 2579 for the second part of today. I’m counting these separately than the totals found for today on my nano blog.

I just discovered that if you mistakenly use passive voice in your writing that word press will show you where that is. It has a feature built into it similar to spell check. With that in mind, it wouldn’t hurt for all authors to have a word press account if for no other reason than to put their writing into a new post to check it out first. They wouldn’t have to actually make the post, although if no posts were ever made I don’t know whether the account would be kept open indefinitely.

Spell check puts a red line under the word, whereas the passive voice flag puts a green line under the phrase.